All posts by Bharath

Sundays present a unique challenge. As a rule that I have set for myself, I spend the whole day with kids. But finding meaning and continuity weekend after weekend proved to be more difficult than I imagined. In the modern consumer world, where there is a “drop a pill” solution for every problem, it is easy to get lost. Often, I have seen parents putting their kids in so many classes that the kid is booked from morning 10am to evening 5pm with no time to experience and absorb life at leisure. Day dreaming is possible only when a kid is provided an opportunity to get bored. Finding out what one truly loves needs a doze of boredom as well. What one loves is essentially what one does not get bored of.

I was looking for a general class of activities that have reasonable structure with good scope for skill-building, but at that same time provide enough fodder for imagination. Most importantly, my kids should love it.

(This was when she was 2 year old. About 2 years ago)

Looking at Anu hammering nails into a wooden block, I gathered that I may have have passed on my love for carpentry to her. But making carpentry easy for a 4 year old is hard! That is where Balsa comes in.

As a kid back in the school days, getting hands on Balsa in the aeronautics club used be such a privilege. Thanks to Amazon, I can get it in a variety of forms and get it right at my doorstep. To begin with, I have ordered sheets and sticks –

5mm sheets. Courtesy : Havoc HobbySticks. Courtesy : Midwest Products

The sheets can be cut easily with a knife/box-cutter such as the one below. (Not to be handled by the kids). I normally involve Anushka in the planning, cut the sheet accordingly and give it to her. The sticks need no tool for cutting. So she can do it by herself. But one can use a good pair of scissors for more precision.

Box cutter. Courtesy : Stanley

A file (Bastard) is needed for plaining –

Bastard : Courtesy Stanley

The below video explains why we need filing –

And lastly, we need glue (A non-toxic glue that can be easily cleaned, washed)

Easy flow glue. Courtesy : Pidilite

Hole drilling can be managed with a simple screw driver. No power tools needed.

I have to still help her with the holding and sticking part. But I leave the planning part to her imagination. As a good side-effect, I am getting my chance at being a kid again. Our work over the last few weekends –

Two weeks ago (I guess she is imaging a children’s play area)

You can see all sorts of random sticking on the left corner, but she seems to have some kind of plan.

Status as of today. Turns out she wants to make a house with a grand entrance. For the flowers, she got some old broken hair clips.

Balsa is also very friendly to coloring. One can use water paint or sketch pens with good ease. Can’t wait to build more cool stuff. I am already building castles in the air… with Balsa.

It was bring your kid to office day at TI and my daughter’s bday was coming up soon as well. I thought I should do something to spook a few kids with some magic. Given the choc-o-bloc schedule these days, I did not want to spend more time than 2-3 hours. Fortunately for me, my team at TI makes a secret ingredient for lots of magic – A 3D sensor.

I started with a OPT8241-CDK (Camera Development Kit). The kit provides a point cloud of 320 x 240 points. Point cloud is nothing but a collection of X, Y, Z and I (intensity) for each pixel in the camera. For example, this is what the point cloud of a lamp looks like –

Point cloud of a Lamp. Courtesy : TI VoxelViewer user guide

After some thought, I decided to make a simple invisible musical instrument that even toddlers can appreciate (my daughter just turned 3). The 3D camera was to face up so that kids can move their hands over the camera to generate musical sounds. The distance of the hand from the camera would fix the amplitude and the lateral position of the hand would fix the note.

The code simply identifies the nearest blob in the scene and it’s 3D position. The ‘Z’ co-ordinate is used for the amplitude, The ‘X’ co-ordinate is digitized and used for the selecting the note. Since I decided to do everything in python, the midi-synthesis was just another line of import statement. All in all, as planned, I was able to complete the code under 2 hours. But the midi library was interesting and I ended up spending another 2 hours just playing with the various instruments available. Seriously, fluidsynth library is fun. The python code is hosted here. If you have an OPT8241-CDK with you and Voxel-SDK up on linux, all you need to do is run the python code.

The word “singularity” has been thrown around a lot these days; Specially in the super AI believer world. But in the lack of a better word, I don’t have a choice but to risk being guilty of sounding cliche. Singularity is a point beyond which normal set of axioms and theorems of our understanding of a certain thing break down. It is what happens to all the understanding of physics beyond the event horizon near a black hole. It is also the point beyond which your idea expressed in seemingly harmless words gets into the hands of journalists who could make it sound like anything they wish.

I wrote this blog on immortality more than 10 years ago. The world has changed a lot in these years. Since then, In the order of increasing significance, the iPhone happened, re-useable rockets happened, LIGO happened, but perhaps the most important of all, a human Jeopardy champion was beaten by a very inanimate lump of silicon. Jeopardy involves the mastery of very high level of natural language skills and human context.

In the blog, I had mentioned about AI as one of the many possible paths to immortality. Given the pace of progress, today perhaps, super AI is our closest route to immortality. A super AI if done correctly, can obviously figure out the rest of the solutions for us. But stuck in a traffic Jam in a massive tunnel in Shenzhen, a certain jam in my brain suddenly cleared up and I found myself wondering about the meaning of it all. I have been lately reading up (listening actually!) the work of some of the leading “human” thinkers of our time who are all gung-ho about AI – Calum Chace, Nick Bostrom, Ray Kurweil…. The one thing that struck me was that all of the above were looking at two extreme outcomes of us final having a super AI moment –

The supposedly bad outcome -The super AI is evil… I don’t want to explain the rest as there a zillion hollywood movies about this one. iRobot, Terminator et. al.

The supposedly good outcome – The super AI is all nice and polite. It thinks humans are love-able puppies that need to be take care of. Therefore, it solves all the world’s sufferings, ushers in a socialist regime where everyone is happy!!

Wtf!!?? The second outcome is probably the one we should be more worried about. Picture this – There is this smart ass in your office who comes up with an idea that is better than yours every single time you come up with what you think is an original idea. Now imagine 100 others like that who simply trash every idea that you come up with and supersede it with something that is obviously better. How would you feel? Super AI is probably going to make it several orders worse. You give it up all, You don’t want to be wired! You take up some art classes for a couple of decades (remember you are immortal now!) and try your hand at painting something. You put it up in an exhibition where the painting next to yours is by some robot with a tin head half your size and it makes your painting look like the work of a 2-yr old. Your only choice… wire up to the super AI and let it guide you or should I say “control you”!!. What is your role exactly??? Why do you exist?

Most of our happiness comes from the path highlighted in green in the cycle below –

All of our long term activities could in turn be broken down into several chunks which looks like the cycle above. Of-course, there is a big grey zone between relish and regret and different people react differently to disasters. The kind who enjoy the journey don’t necessarily regret no matter what the outcome is. But the kind who enjoy the journey, enjoy it for the pleasant surprises. I don’t know of a person who can enjoy a monotonic tunnel journey for several hours, let alone several days on. But that’s exactly what life will look like when one lives long enough and has an organic reach to super AI. Surprising such a being is like trying to surprise god! The optimists may say –
“who knows? we will probably invent new ways of entertaining ourselves”. That brings me to the next point.

When with the help of super AI, one has seen it all, what does one do? play games perhaps? What kind of games? Chess? Boring drab. that did not even need super AI. some crazy multi-dimensional chess? But hold-on, a few seconds later, your extended AI has solved that too. To make matters worse, if it is a multi-player game, each participant exactly knows what the other participant in a game is thinking. Perhaps, we then begin to truly understand what a game has to be so that it is enjoyable. A game has to have artificial limitations. Why do we like a game of cards? Not because anything can happen, but because only a certain set of sequences are allowed to be played.

But when playing games, how do we make sure that no one is cheating consciously or sub-consciously with the help of extended super AI? Create a construct where super AI is out of reach? Perhaps, create a virtual world where players can project their persona on some Avatars and play as per the physics defined in that virtual world? Perhaps go one level further to make it exciting… Get into the virtual world and you can’t get out of it till you experience the pain of death in the virtual world!! And to spice it all up, what if you are not allowed to carry memories of your world into the virtual world, but just project your persona in a particular manner and let the game run it’s course?

And then it dawned upon me that we are probably one such projection!! Suddenly the Hindu concepts of Maya (illusion), Punarjanma (re-birth), Karma (no equivalent) , Manu (the first law-giver), Brahma (The creator of the illusion), Vishnu (the super AI)… all made such great sense. We can’t even tell how many iterations deep we are into such an illusion. To think that we are the first ones to create such a virtual world within a supposedly real world would be very gullible of us! How many deaths do I have to die to see the real thing?? Is there such a reality at all? Is there any meaning at all to life? If a Super AI that can be explained in it’s electronic nuts and bolts can entirely emulate and outperform a human being, aren’t we going to be convinced enough that we are just another machine moving randomly with a false sense of purpose and sentience?

And what’s wrong with super AI wiping us humans out? Don’t we all wish for a better future for our children irrespective of what happens to us? How is a super AI different from our children as long as it creates a better future for itself in it’s own way? How is a new generation of humans that are drastically different from a generation born 500 years earlier not equivalent to a drastically different super AI which nevertheless is our child.. only a brain-child rather than a gene-child.

I can’t predict the benevolence or malevolence of super AI with any degree of certainty, but it is clear to me that super AI will help even the dumbest of us to understand the meaning or the lack of it in our existence. And that will lead us to our Nirvana – The singularity of Sentience.

I am just beginning on this topic again after a decade! More to come in the subsequent posts.

I have been working at TI for nearly 8 years now. I have also been living in Kadugodi for nearly 7 years in a self-owned apartment. I can already hear readers who are residents of Bangalore going “whoooaaa! Kadugodi to CV Raman Nagar!! How does this guy even do it?”. Thankfully, the truth is not as bad as it appears. I maintain very strict journey times to avoid peak traffic and manage the one way journey in 30-40 mins. My average is about 33 mins. Before I begin the rest of my story, I should thank Lord Vishnu for choosing to rest in Thirupathi. I don’t know if my theory is true, but I think Old Madras Road is maintained so that the travel to Thirupathi remains convenient. The population on this side of the city has burgeoned manifold, numerous junctions have been added, signals have come and gone, but my travel time stubbornly remains between 30-40 mins. There is some crazy disruption every few months, but the almighty gets into action soon to miraculously clear up the mess.

KR Puram Cable Bridge

30-40 mins of one way commute is probably in the top 20 percentile levels in Bangalore (higher percentile = lesser travel), but it is still a significant amount of time. For a long time, I was literally at war with myself; I was considering moving back to some place closer. But self-owned homes kind of grow on you; Readers who live self-owned homes can relate with me. The roots just keep going deeper. Reminds me of the great Kannada poet Kuvempu who said “ಮನೆಯನೆಂದೂ ಕಟ್ಟದಿರು …. ಓ ನನ್ನ ಚೇತನ ಆಗು ನೀನು ಅನಿಕೇತನ”. Translated as – “Rest nowhere on the unending road, never build a binding nest …. Never touch the boundary, Remain infinite and boundless!!” in a famous poem. I now know that he meant it both figuratively and literally. Once the realisation dawned upon me that a large part of my life is going to spent on the road for a long time to come, I began to think about the means to use the time spent more efficiently.

KR Puram Cable Bridge

One could consider hiring a chauffeur, but it is an expensive option that costs upwards of Rs.12k per month and my motion sickness does not help either. I am at ease only when I am in complete control. The brake-gear-clutch-gas drudgery was unavoidable.

Back in the days when smart phone technology was not upto the mark, it was quite hard to do justice to 30-40 mins of travel time. I used some of my time on the way to office planning the day’s activities. If there is a particularly hard technical problem that demands a fair bit of imagination, a stalled car in a traffic signal is one of the best place to think about it. Infact, ~50% of the interesting ideas that I have come up with have been on old madras road. In the evenings on the return journey, I would spend the time recalling the key events, discussions and decisions. But day dreaming is risky at times; there is always this street ninja who is out to surprise you. On an average, I could use ~20% of the travel time thinking about things that mattered. Taking calls is another activity that one can do on the road. But our R&D team is entirely located in one office in Bangalore and there are not too many calls that I need to attend around the travel times.

Radio used to be a decent entertainment option, but most of the stuff on Radio these days is reality advertisements and other garbage. With the advent of smart phone, things changed remarkably. Music became a major component of travel. I am terrible singer, but who cares?? No one can hear me outside the car. Singing along classical singers became one of my favourite pass-times. Google Music added an entirely new dimension. I now have my entire collection online. I have playlists for various times-of-the-day, moods, people in my car etc.

Most recently, listening to books on Amazon’s Audible has become my favourite activity. I spend ~Rs.1000 every month, but that covers for nearly 50% of my time in the car. I don’t mind the traffic at all these days. Infact, there are times when I am close to one of those critical moments in a book and I wish that that last signal on my journey stays at red for a little while longer.

If you ever find yourself wondering what to do next with your high energy toddler, this game could come in handy. All it needs is 3-4 colored crayons and 4′ x 2′ of space.

Draw some colored circles on the floor (Squares work too). Be sure to keep it symmetric on at the least one axis to keep it simple. Toddlers can imagine mirroring more easily than rotation.

Example Circles

Stand in any of the circles and make your kid stand in the opposite one of the same color. You are all set! The rest is best explained through this video –

It is easy to add more complications. Adding more circles is one way of doing it. One can add different shapes too. Encourage your toddler to memorize the color-position association so that he/she need not look before taking a jump. The memorization helps to train spatial memory.

My daughter is nearly 3 years old now. When she was about 2yrs old, I noticed something very interesting. She had been barely walking for 15 months and now here she was, trying to balance herself on a narrow divider that divides the garden and the walking area. The divider was just as wide as her feet and about one foot tall (one foot is a lot when your whole height is ~85cm). She did not progress much before she called out for my help, but the courage that she demonstrated in just going ahead and trying it out put me into thought. I had to do something to let her be more adventurous, yet safe. Incidentally, Radhika (my better-half) had found a great carpenter. I quickly designed something that was inspired by the ramp walk obstacle in the obstacle coarse we had at school (It’s another of those Sainik School things that non-Ajeets may need more explanation on. Don’t bother). The carpenter quickly got on with his job, and in less than a week from conceptualisation we got this –

The experiment proved very successful. Within a week, Anu could go end to end –

She fell innumerable number of times before getting to this stage, but thanks to some cheering, she kept trying. Once she mastered walking, as expected she started challenging herself; Running, turning around, jumping in place, jumping forward and a lot more. More importantly, the beam provided her a platform to fail over and over again, overcome her fear and succeed. For those who are interested in replicating the setup, the material used is Indian teak and here are the dimensions –

Beam – ElevationBeam – Perspective

Take care to round all corners. The one that we made is sturdy enough to support an 80Kg adult. Do test thoroughly before letting your kid try it.

Between the last blog and this one, I have travelled to Shenzhen another 4 times. I have survived through one typhoon and multiple flu episodes during the same time in Shenzhen. The construction landscape is so dynamic that the city manages to have some surprise in store every time I land. The last time I visited the place was in mid January (this month).

The view that Deng Xiaoping’s statue gets to look at the city of his dreams from Lianhuashan Park.

For any person living far away from Mainland china, the best way to get in and out of the city is to catch a flight to HK airport and use the ferry. They now have an all new swanky port at Shekou! Try to avoid having a checked in baggage to save precious time. For most part of the day, the ferries are 1 hr apart. If you have a checked-in baggage, you have to have about 2 hrs margin time between the flight landing time and the ferry departure time. If you just have a hand-carry, 1hr margin is sufficient. The ferry takes about 20 mins to cover the distance between HK airport and the Shekou port. Immigration is a breeze. From the new prince bay port at Shekou, one can take a shuttle to go to the old port. Metro station is closer to the old port. Taxis and buses are also available at the new port. For departures from HK airport, If you just have a hand carry, arrive 3 hrs before scheduled flight departure at the Shekou port. If you need to check in your bag at the port, 4 hrs margin will be safe. But you can choose to check the baggage in at HK airport after getting down from the ferry. Be sure to carry Chinese Yuan (Remnibi) to the port (I have had one hell of an experience by not following this guideline, and that should make for another story). They do not accept any card (including union bank card for the smarties who are reading this, smiling and saying “I have a Chinese bank account and a union bank card!! he he he!”) and there is no ATM at the new port as of today. Do not forget to visit the airlines counter once you get to HK airport to collect your tax refund coupon of 120HKD which you can avail at the tax refund counter!

The new prince bay port at Shenzhen

Inside the city, metro is the best way to commute. Choose an accommodation that is near a metro station; ideally near a metro junction such as “The windows of the world” station. Airbnb should work fine, but take care to report to a nearby police station every week and register yourself (They freak out if you are a foreigner who is off the radar. Read the instructions on your landing card for updates on this). Buy a Shenzhen-HK Tong (metro-card) to make your life easy. It looks like the image below –

Shenzhen-HK Tong

It costs 50 Yuan and you need to add additional 50 Yuan at the minimum to start your commute. It is totally worth it. It works from a couple of cm. So you need not pull it out of your wallet to swipe. You may need to visit a major station such as “The windows of the world” to buy this card.

Shenzhen grows faster than it’s metro. There are many places worth going where the metro won’t take you. For all such places, use Didi (Chinese equivalent of Uber). I have very rarely needed to take a Taxi though. Shenzhen is relatively free from pollution (compared to Shanghai or Beijing); Whenever I get a chance, I walk.

I have not needed to take a bus so far (other than the free shuttle from prince-bay port to older Shekou port). So I can’t speak much about it. But, given the reach of the metro, metro + Didi works just fine.

Given the increasing attention deficit that the youth is suffering from, I decided to split this one into multiple posts. The series is for relevant for any of the following groups (in the decreasing order) –

People going for a short period of work to Shenzhen.

People who want to do a hardware startup and just figured out that they need to go Shenzhen. It is the Mecca of electronics.

People who travel to Shenzhen often (>2 times a year)

I am writing the post on Information Channels first, because communication is more important that anything else. I can’t (for that matter no one can) describe Shenzhen in every detail in one book let alone a blog post. With the right tools to search and communicate, anyone can figure out the rest.

The most important basic human rights are – access to clean and healthy air, water, internet, food and shelter (in that order). I don’t believe I have any fish as my audience. So, I don’t need to write about getting air and water in the right proportions in Shenzhen. And to the relief of the land animals, at the least with respect to these two elements, china is no different. But when it comes to internet, if the literary critics allow me a small degree of freedom, china is “infoccating” (intentional double c for the effect). To the uninformed, this is the realization sequence –

Our hero lands in china, goes to the hotel, connects to wifi to figure out a few things. Types something in google and nothing happens for a long time. Somebody had mentioned Baidu to this goody-2-shoes and so he types www.baidu.com and yo! bingo ! internet!!. But then, it slowly dawns upon him that majority searches need translation. Also, Baidu’s AI has much to learn. Google natural language search through the years has unknowingly let us become dumb once again.

Then he goes to a restaurant and looks at the menu. Recalls that he was bad at Pictionary anyway. The smarty pants picks up his phone with a grin and tries google translate ….. nothing happens…. 2 mins.. still nothing…. and finally realizes that he has hit the aptly called Great Firewall of China once again!! Now what?? Act like a monkey so someone may toss a banana or two and finally get something vegetarian to eat!

Google services are Firewalled in China except in few companies and the higher end hotels. So are Facebook and twitter. Whatsapp works though! You see, Zuckki did not pay $19B for nothing. So what is the way out? VPNs to the rescue. It is said that even a 2 year old in china knows how to connect to VPN. But not all VPN services are really useful. Specially the free ones. After many trials and errors, I have locked on to VyprVPN. Use the paid version. It costs about $10 a month at the moment. Totally worth it in China. Do not forget to cancel the subscription once you return. It is easy to get fleeced with automatic monthly subscriptions. Chinese firewall is not that easy to breach, the VPN keeps getting disconnected if you try the usual suspects – HK, any site in US, South East Asia etc. Try something exotic like Argentina or some eastern European country. Argentina was my personal favorite. As an alternative to all of this, I tried working with Baidu services for sometime – Maps, Translate etc.. But gave up after sometime. For two reasons.. 1. They suck. 2. With the phone permissions that you need to grant them, you have basically sold your soul.

VyprVPN Logo

For communicating with people, Wechat is a must. It is even better than google translate. Google translate on a VPN or even otherwise takes 2-3 seconds to turn around. Wechat does it under 1 second. In my cumulative stay of greater than 20 days, I have not come across a single person in China without a Wechat ID. Wechat features an inbuilt translator. Each person on either end can type in his own language and the other one can view the message with translation. Just walk up to any person you want to talk to and show your Wechat ID QR code. This is one gesture that most people recognize (even though they don’t agree countrywide on the basic gestures such as the gestures for numbers 7 and 10). The other person will scan it and you are instantly connected! Wechat is also more than just the one-to-one chat. It is a platform for chatrooms and other services. One such very useful one is the Spoonhunt service. The service helps find nearby restaurants sorted by cuisines and customer ratings.

Wechat – QR code scanning

To be able to do any of the above on the move, it is necessary to have good mobile internet. There are plenty of options for buying prepaid SIM card. The service that has maximum coverage in China is China Unicom. I usually walk upto a store with some Chinese currency and a passport and buy the appropriate package as per the length of stay and data requirements. Within Shenzhen, the nearest store is typically within 10 minutes of walk. Cash is a must in most places in China. 99.99% of the places do not accept VISA, Amex, Mastercard based cards. At the time of this post, ~200RMB is sufficient to buy a week’s worth of talk-time and data. Google hangout dialer or skype can be used for international calling whenever the tower signal is good. It can be hard using VoIP during the metro rides. In emergencies, GSM based calling is reasonable too. At the time of this post, it is 10RMB/min for a call to India. Although, I have not felt the strong need, some people have suggested using online services to pre-order a SIM card to the hotel – http://www.3gsolutions.com.cn/. The convenience of getting the SIM card without having to walk to a store is probably worth it. Also, when you are buying a SIM card at the physical store, it is one conversation for which you can’t use google translate or Wechat services. The other advantage with the online service is that you can share the Chinese phone number in advance with the people concerned. There is also an option for a pay-as-you-go permanent Chinese phone number. In my last visit, I used the VPN service from 3gsolutions and found it to be good, infact better than VyprVPN. It is a bit pricey though at $7/week. The VPN service works even for people who have not bought a simcard from 3gsolutions. For people who want to frequent between HK and Senzhen, refer to this – http://hktravelblog.com/sim-cards/top-hong-kong-prepaid-sim-card/

I am writing a blog almost after two years of silence. There is a good reason for the silence as well as the breaking of it. My daughter kept me very busy – That answers the first part. The mosquitoes got back at me.. and not just me, Radhika (my wife) too. My last post was ironically about my fight against mosquitoes when I was trying to secure the home and the surroundings before I got Anushka (my daughter) back to our Bangalore home from the maike at Pune. So I had to write this and get back at the mosquitoes again. Let me begin with some drama –

The Fall

On June 2nd, we were waiting for our Bangalore-Pune flight boarding to begin. I was in some sort of in-cohesive mental and physical state. Suddenly Radhika, who was until that moment running around Anushka, said – “Hey! we are at the wrong gate. What are you doing??” I turned around and saw, she was right! Run!! We were the last people to enter the flight. We were even lucky that they let us in. I still wonder where I got the energy from to run in that state. Earlier that day in the morning, the day started quite normally. We sent Anushka to her pre-school and started taking a peaceful morning walk. A little while later, Radhika went to shop some vegetables, I was preparing to go to office and suddenly I started feeling feverish. By the time Radhika was back, I was lying in two layers of blanket trying to feel normal. Immediately, she took me to the hospital. Columbia Asia is supposed to be a whatever * hospital and still they caused so much delay in just taking my blood while I was sitting (rather trying to sit) on the bench. Anyways, let me get back at them with all the *#& words included in another blog. 2 hrs later I was diagnosed Dengue positive.

I was in a state of shock! Not just because it was Dengue, but because if there is a competition on paranoia about mosquitoes, I would be in the top 99.99 percentile range. Damn it, I even wrote a blog about it thinking I have mastered the art of keeping the pesky buzzers away. By evening I was having fever close to 104°F and paracetamol tablets weren’t really helping beyond an hour of relief. Radhika had started to feel unwell too. But it was not as bad as it was with me and so we ignored it assuming that it must be some minor viral fever and she just popped in a paracetamol. But since both were feeling unwell and there was Anushka to be taken care of, we decided to mitigate the risk and fly to Pune immediately. Thankfully my father-in-law is a doctor and runs his own nursing home in Pune with the home on the top floor and the nursing home in the lower floors.

Once we reached Pune, all was taken care of. I was immediately on saline and a cocktail of drugs was pushed into my veins within 1 hr of my arrival. Radhika was feeling all ok for the moment. A day later, her fever started to recur. But since I was the Jamai Raja and she wasn’t falling down like me, people brushed her complaints. Infact, she was taking care of me. Finally, on morning of 4th June, after repeated complaints, they tested her blood and she was turned out to be Dengue positive too. One hell of a Sati Savithiri. She decided to give me company even with Dengue. I hate the movie, but it was our little “The Notebook” moment. From that moment till 9th June, we slept together for the longest time ever!! I can’t remember much in between as it was just drugs and nightmares all through. And oh! yes, I remember the unbelievably bitter Papaya leaf extract too. Supposedly it helped, I reached a lowest platelet count of 75,000 which is considered very safe (but who knows if it really helped. Radhika drank Aloe Vera and she seemed to be doing even better). But there was one particular night I remember. My creativity suddenly spiked. I was thinking, blabbering and writing like never before (must be the tramadol doze, it works like Ganja). If the moment had lasted for 10 more hours, I would have probably solved all the unsolved problems in physics. But alas, I was juiced out after 30 mins. At that moment, I doubt started creeping in my mind that many of the products of genius such as Beethoven’s works, Mozart’s works or even my personal hero Feynman’s works are probably products of Hashish, Ganja, LSD or something like that. Can’t say for sure till we invent a time machine.

Although the fever had subsided, it took us a couple more days before we could start moving around. Even on 12th June, one floor felt like a major trek in the western ghats. The illness had left me feeling like I was part of some major gang war and I was flogged all over. I do not know if something could be worse, but Radhika supposedly felt even worse with major joint pains. She even almost fainted once due to low BP. Finally, we returned to Bangalore on the morning of 13th. The only good news was that Anushka did not get dengue and she spent time happy times with her maternal grandparents.

Back to Paranoia

The battle was lost, but the war had to go on. I realized I can’t fight alone. Some of us in our apartment (mostly dengue veterans) got together and discussed. We started fumigation using citronella and neem oil on a larger scale around the apartments. Got a very good contact in Bangalore to source the same at reasonable prices – Falcon essential oils. For homes, one can put the oils directly in a mist sprayer and spray it around. A mix of 80% citronella with 10% neem and 10% eucalyptus is quite effective as well as pleasant to the senses. Note that the odor is quite strong, so don’t spray it like your car cleaner liquid. Also, it does not help much to spray it all over the house. The spray has to be mainly used near the entry points for mosquitoes such as front doors, windows without insect meshes etc. For common areas in apartments, a minimum of 1 litre per acre is recommended. Since one can’t spray so thin and even, mix 1 litre in 100 litres of water and use a regular fumigation equipment to fumigate the common areas. Spray the oils at about 4:00PM as dengue mosquitoes are day mosquitoes and become active well before the regular mosquitoes start their onslaught. There are some conveniently bottled sprays such as the ones below, but they are way more expensive as compared to procuring from some local essential oils dealer –

Radhika and I started applying the Dabur repellant cream when we step out –

it says “naturals”, but it is not. As of now, 100% guarantee from mosquito bytes is provided only by a reasonably safe chemical called DEET and this cream contains the same. it’s safety on children is highly debated on the web. I wouldn’t take a chance given that it can cause neurological disorders. But it is certified by NIMA to be used even on babies. Natural solutions work, but only to some extent. For my daughter, I had to try various creams before finalizing on this one from Vitro –

Also, you get various citronella patches such as these –

It is recommended to use two of them simultaneously. One on the leg and one on the shoulder for best effects. But as I mentioned before, none of these natural solutions are 100% percent effective against mosquito bites.

For completion sake, I want to mention again that insect nets on windows are a must in a city like Bangalore as mentioned in my previous post. There are very good vendors such as the ones below (I have tried both and got excellent service)

Pinchood – Specialize in magnetic nets around the windows. But french windows are not exactly their area of expertize.

Delmen – Good at handling French windows and front doors. Might be good at normal magnetic nets around windows too, but I have not tried.

Even after doing all of the above, it is better to flush mosquitoes by using regular mosquito coils for about 40 mins in the evening with all doors and windows closed. You can go around for a walk to avoid all the Allethrin breathing. Once you are back, open all the windows (with meshes of course) and feel free to breath again. To make it even better, some fragrance from a sandal dhoop from Cauvery can help.

Lastly, I wrote this blog hoping it will spread awareness on prevention of dengue. Note that all I have written about is the last line of defense. The ideal way is to prevent mosquito breeding itself by making sure there is not stagnant water and blah blah!. You will find that on NHP site. But unfortunately, sometimes you don’t exactly have control on what your neighbours are doing.

If you have been following my blog, you would know that I am a new father. About a month ago I had to bring my wife and kid back from the Maike (Mother’s home in Hindi). One of the big ticket items on my list before I brought them here was mosquito control. Our area (Kadugodi) in Bangalore is one of worst affected in terms of mosquito infestation. The corporation doesn’t give a damn. What’s worse is that a size-able percentage of these mosquitoes are the exotic variety that spread Dengue – Aedes Aegypti.

Dengue is a very dangerous disease to ignore. It has no known vaccine or cure. The body can only be helped to survive and heal itself. In kids specially, it can be fatal. All this drove me to Paranoia. In this post, I have listed the various methods of mosquito control that I have tried and the highlighted ones that seem to work best.

Blockade

The best method of mosquito control is to simply mesh up the entire home. All windows/door/exit fans. We had already meshed our home some 3 years ago. What we had not anticipated was that the nets would tear in a few places within such a short period. I had to search for some kind of glue that will fix it. Finally, some pipe sealing glue worked perfectly. Once the nets were fixed, we were dealing with only a handful of mosquitoes per day that somehow managed to hitchhike a ride whenever someone was going in or out from one of the balcony doors or the main entrance. But to make the night miserable, all it takes is just one mosquito. So, I had to take the war to the next level.

All out war

I had to try some of the usual suspects – Mosquito coils, liquidators etc. All of them worked, but I was worried about the effects they will have on a 4 month old baby. I myself felt drowsy in the mornings whenever I used a liquidator. I am pretty sure, it would do no good to a small kid. The other issue is that you need to keep using the liquidator day long as Dengue mosquitoes usually bite during the day . But some small harm still sounded better than Dengue/Malaria. I also tried the regular Dhoop (Incense). Dhoop is probably not as harmful to us as most of the commercial products. Also, the sandalwood fragrance is soothing. Overall, Dhoop seemed better than the regular liquidators, but the effects were very temporary.

In the middle of all this, I started wondering if I am the only guy who is struggling with this issue. Definitely this is an age old problem and someone should have solved it! I searched online and came across some mosquito killer machines. Although, I did not believe in their efficacy, I thought of giving it a try. I tried this one – Wantrn.

They claim two things – Lighting and a special TiO2 coating that emits CO2 to attract mosquitoes. The TiO2 coating claim is obviously a fraud. To emit as much carbon-dioxide as a human, one would have to heat about a Kg of TiO2. A coating would do nothing. I still had some hope that the lighting might trick the mosquitoes. There was no way to know other than ordering one for Rs.1000 and trying it out. The experiment was a disaster. Over a period of one week, under various conditions (light/dark, windy/still air, at various heights) the machine managed to catch zero mosquitoes! absolute zilch! I gave up.

Minimum Deterrence

I finally zeroed in upon some organic solutions. For example, Lemongrass oil is a very good repellent. Note that repellents are better than those that kill because, if you kill, you let evolution get the better of you eventually. If you just repel, you win! I tried making some oil using lemon grass and it seemed to work. But it turned out to be both cumbersome and expensive. Finally, I ordered some lemon grass oil from a local vendor who sold it for Rs.400/500gms. For an average Indian home, 500gms should last for about 6 to 12 months easily.

For using lemongrass oil as a repellent, pour about 2ml of the oil in about 300ml of water, shake well to form an emulsion. Spray the solution near the entrances. With the combination of lemon grass and the meshing, I am finally getting a good night’s sleep. Also, lemongrass oil has a refreshing aroma. It is clearly quite harmless as it is also used in some forms of tea. It is quite surprising that such a cost effective and safe solution is not so popular.